Grotesque

Within the space of a year, two prostitutes have been strangled in Tokyo.

Two decades earlier, both had been pupils in the exclusive Q school system, a hothouse for the brightest or wealthiest children. Narrated by the sister of one of the victims, who also includes their diaries and the testimony of the man accused of the crimes, Grotesque is more interested in dissecting the reasons why these privileged girls decided to enter the skin trade than in getting to the bottom of ‘whodunnit’ and ‘whydunnit’.

Of the two, Yuriko’s motivation seems the most straightforward. Uncannily beautiful, she draws the attention of almost all men from an early age. After her first experience of sex, she realises that this is what she wants; revelling in her lasciviousness, she seduces her guardian, then – with the help of a professor’s son – sets herself up as a prostitute at school. This becomes her life, despising men but loving sex, knowing and accepting that at some point she will be murdered.

Kazue is a different, and more complex, character. Desperate to succeed at school, and pushed relentlessly by a miserly father who orders his household hierarchically, she is shunned by the inner elite at the Q high school. Kazue is convinced that she can overcome all hurdles if she just tries hard enough, but time and gain she puts her foot wrong and lays herself open to bullying, even by those that she considers to be her friends.

Kazue succeeds academically, and gets herself a good job after university, but even here her overinflated sense of self-worth is challenged and mocked by her colleagues, and again she is spurned. Drawn into the twilight world of prostitution as an escape from this daily grind, Kazue’s final degradations begin.

At the pulsing centre of Grotesque, however, sits the narrator (whose name is only mentioned once). Self-confessedly plain, we learn of the hatred she has always harboured for her beautiful sister; she tells us how much she scorned Kazue’s pitiful weakness, and how much she enjoyed lying to her for pleasure. Abhorred by their descent into prostitution, she vows to remain a virgin all her life.

Such vitriolic hatred is hard to swallow over 450 pages, but nagging doubts hover over her testimony: Can she really hate her own sister so vehemently? Is she merely jealous? Is she telling the complete truth? Has she adulterated Yuriko and Kazue’s diaries for our consumption? She accuses both of being monsters, but is she, in fact, the real monster?

Kirino lets us decide, but she is less ambiguous about the pressures Japanese society places upon its individuals to succeed – and the terrible price of failure. All her characters are damaged and, for the most part, unlikeable, but what made them that way?

The older generation may still adhere to strict codes of behaviour – codes that relegate women (and especially mothers) to lowly, almost servile, positions, but which also demand the acceptance of blame for transgressions – but the young, meanwhile, are drifting towards a looser, anarchical way of living, bringing pressures of a different kind to bear.

Like Kirino’s last book, the gruesome thriller Out, Grotesque is scathing about the way women are treated in Japan. But whereas the women in Out banded together initially to help each other, here there is no camaraderie; only rivalry and hatred. This is a bleak scenario, and makes for a bleak novel, but it is hard to ignore the power of Kirino’s writing and the conviction of her vision.